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Monday, May 14, 2018

Ecuador hints it may hand over Assange which is understood to mean to the US for punishment. The 'left' is thrilled since it has merged with the global Establishment--Consortium News...(#1 goal of the left and entire US political class is to silence the rest of us which they plan to do with a blundering "intelligence community" that answers to no one. Donald Trump could guarantee his re-election by offering Assange asylum in the US)

"Julian
Assange has remained incommunicado for more than six weeks and as his
health deteriorates many of his former supporters have remained silent
too, says James Cogan."

"Julian
Assange is in immense danger. Remarks made this week by Ecuador’s
foreign minister suggest that her government may be preparing to renege
on the political asylum it granted to the WikiLeaks editor in 2012 and
hand him over to British and then American authorities.

On
March 28, under immense pressure from the British and U.S. governments,
Ecuador imposed a complete ban on Assange having any Internet or phone
contact with the outside world, and blocked his friends and supporters
from physically visiting him. For 46 days, he has not been heard from.

Ecuadorian
Foreign Minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa stated in a Spanish-language
interview on Wednesday that her government and Britain “have the
intention and the interest that this be resolved.” Moves were underway,
she said, to reach a “definite agreement” on Assange.

If
Assange falls into the hands of the British state, he faces being
turned over to the U.S. Last year, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions
stated that putting Assange on trial for espionage was a “priority.” CIA
director Mike Pompeo, now secretary of state, asserted that WikiLeaks
was a “non-state hostile intelligence service.”

In
2010, WikiLeaks courageously published information leaked by then
Private Bradley [now Chelsea] Manning that exposed war crimes committed
by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. WikiLeaks also published, in
partnership with some of the world’s major newspapers, tens of
thousands of secret diplomatic cables, exposing the daily
anti-democratic intrigues of U.S. imperialism and numerous other
governments.

For that, Assange was relentlessly persecuted by the Obama administration.By November 2010, it had convened
a secret grand jury and had a warrant issued for his arrest on charges
of espionage—charges that can carry the death sentence.

The then Labor
Party government in Australia headed by Prime Minister Julia Gillard
threw Assange, an Australian citizen, to the wolves. It refused to
provide him any defense and declared it would work with the U.S. to have
him detained and put on trial.On
June 19, 2012, under conditions in which he faced extradition to Sweden
to answer questions over fabricated allegations of sexual assault, and
the prospect of rendition to the United States, Assange sought asylum in
the Ecuador’s embassy in London.

Since
that time, for nearly six years, he has been largely confined to a
small room with no direct sunlight. He has been prevented from leaving,
even to obtain medical treatment, by the British government’s insistence
it will arrest him for breaching bail as soon as he sets foot outside
the embassy.

Silenced

Now, for six weeks and three days, he has been denied even the right to communicate.

Jennifer Robinson, the British-based Australian lawyer who has represented Assange since 2010, told the London Times in
an interview this month: “His health situation is terrible. He’s had a
problem with his shoulder for a very long time. It requires an MRI
[magnetic resonance imaging scan], which cannot be done within the
embassy.

He’s got dental issues. And then there’s the long-term impact
of not being outside, his visual impairment. He wouldn’t be able to see
further than from here to the end of this hallway.”

The
effort to haul Assange before a U.S. courtis inseparable from the
broader campaign underway by the American state and allied governments
to impose sweeping censorship on the Internet.Lurid allegations of
“Russian meddling” in the 2016 U.S. election and denunciations of “fake
news” have been used
to demand that Google, Facebook and other conglomerates block users
from accessing websites that publish critical commentary and exposures
of the ruling class and its agencies—including WikiLeaks, Consortium
News and the World Socialist Web Site.

WikiLeaks
has been absurdly denounced as “pro-Russia” because it published leaks
from the U.S. Democratic Party National Committee that revealed the
anti-democratic intrigues the party’s leaders carried out to undermine
the campaign of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary
elections. It also published leaked speeches of presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton that further exposed her intimate relations with Wall
Street banks and companies.

As
part of the justification for Internet censorship,U.S. intelligence
agencies allege, without any evidence, that the information was hacked
by Russian operatives and supplied to WikiLeaks to undermine Clinton and
assist Trump—whom Moscow purportedly considered the “lesser evil.”

In
response to the hysterical allegations, WikiLeaks broke its own
tradition of not commenting on its sources. It publicly denied that
Russia was the source of the leaks. That has not prevented the campaign
from continuing, with Assange even being labelled “the Kremlin’s useful
idiot” in pro-Democratic Party circles. WikiLeaks is blamed for
Clinton’s defeat, not the reality, that tens of millions of American
workers were repulsed by her right-wing, pro-war campaign and refused to
vote for her.

Silence of Former Supporters

Under
conditions in which the Ecuadorian government has capitulated to great
power pressure and is collaborating with British and U.S. agencies to
break Assange, there is an almost universal and reprehensible silence on
the part of dozens of organizations and hundreds of individuals who
once claimed to defend him and WikiLeaks.

The
United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which in February
2016 condemned Assange’s persecution as “a form of arbitrary detention”
and called for his release, has issued no statement on his current
situation.

In
Britain, the Labour Party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn have said
nothing on the actions by Ecuador. Nor have they opposed the
determination of the Conservative government to arrest Assange if he
leaves the embassy.

In
Australia, the current Liberal-National government and Labor leadership
are just as complicit. The Greens, which claimed to oppose the
persecution of Assange, have not made any statement in Parliament or
issued a press release, let alone called for public protests. Hundreds
of editors, journalists, academics, artists and lawyers across the
country who publicly defended WikiLeaks in 2010 and 2011 are now mute.

A
parallel situation prevails across Europe and in the U.S..

Around
the world, pseudo-left organizations, anxious not to disrupt their
sordid relations with the parties of the political establishment and the
trade union apparatuses, are likewise silent.